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Category Archives: Conferences

I had a great time speaking at Microsoft’s Ignite conference last week! It was fun talking a bit about our startup journey at Hyperfish and some of the decisions we made along the way about running and supporting our service.

This was a totally new topic for me and something a bit outside my normal speaking topics … but I really enjoy sharing our journey with others!

As much as I dislike being away from my family for long I also enjoy getting out of the ivory tower (Redmond) too. It’s a great chance to meet people, talk about what they are working on and let people know what we are working on too.

I have a few trips planned for the rest of the year and rather than doing one post per thing I thought I would summarize things in one post here.

I am heading back to my home country for this always fun and exciting conference! I have spoken at it a couple of times in the past and Debbie and the team put on an excellent show! I am participating in the keynote as well as doing a session:

SharePoint and Office Developer Power HourCome and hear about all the latest goings on for developers in the Office and SharePoint world. This session will be demo-heavy and will focus a lot on integration of your apps, mobile applications, products and solutions with Office 365. You will leave armed with the ammo you need to go and build or integrate your web, mobile or native applications with the world’s most popular productivity platform on the planet.”

SharePointalooza is a unique experience combining SharePoint training from the top SharePoint minds in the world along with live music from great bands at night in Branson, Missouri. Organized by Mark Rackley it’s a really fun grass roots event. Rob Lefferts and I are one of the keynotes.

This conference is great for those looking at getting a broad look at the end to end of SharePoint and Office 365. It’s not just for developers or IT Pros. The Office 365 team are sending a few people down to do sessions. I am presenting on:

Getting Started with Office 365 APIs

Getting Started with Apps for SharePoint and Apps for Office

Discount code: “JOHNSON” for $50 off registration

I am REALLY excited about visiting Amsterdam for the first time and joining loads of SharePoint experts for two jam packed days of learning. I am keynoting the event with a discussion about The Road to Office 365 and the Future of Cloud Development and presenting a session on Office 365 Services for Desktop, Mobile and Web Applications.

I’m heading to the Build conference next week in San Francisco, YAY my first //build ever. We have a bunch of great developer related content for SharePoint and Office 365 there. Don’t worry if you have not developed for SharePoint or 365 before, there is content to get you up to speed!

Here are the sessions:

Building Connected Productivity Apps

Brian Jones

Office Power Hour – New developer APIs and features for Apps for Office

Rolando Jimenez Salgado

SharePoint Power Hour – New developer APIs and features for Apps for SharePoint

Rob Howard

SharePoint 2013 Apps with AngularJS

Jeremy Thake

Building Enterprise Social Apps with Yammer

Jose Juarez Comboni

The brand new OneNote service – reach the massive user base with your apps.

Gareth Jones

Developing Office 365 Cloud Business Apps

Dan Fernandez

Deep Dive into Mail Compose Apps APIs

Andrew Salamatov

Also Office 365 will have a booth so come and visit the booth and connect with the speakers and the team from Redmond.

Register with the code JOHNSON and get $50 off. And get a free Surface or XBox One!*

WHERE: October 27-31, 2013, MGM Grand, Las Vegas, Nevada

SHAREPOINT INTERSECTION 2013 is an entirely new type of event, and it’s the one event you won’t want to miss. Join the world’s top SharePoint experts, Microsoft’s own product team, and hundreds of peers representing IT, business, developer, and design communities as we intersect to solve business problems and to maximize the value of SharePoint for our organizations.

TRAINING: SharePoint Intersection features more than 50 sessions presented by the best-known names in the industry. As if that’s not enough, five full-day workshops dive deep into key challenges and workloads.

FOR ALL YOU’RE DOING: Training at SharePoint Intersection is not just “50 random sessions”. Instead, the event’s sessions have been carefully laid out to deliver end-to-end guidance and solutions across 11 scenarios or “workloads”

Developing Apps and Enterprise Solutions

Administering and Managing SharePoint

Upgrading and Migrating to SharePoint 2013

Strategy, Governance, Adoption, and the Business of SharePoint

SharePoint in Office 365, the Cloud and Hybrid Environments

Collaboration and Content Management: ECM, IM, RM and DM

Search with SharePoint

Workflow, Business Process Management and Automation

Insight, Business Intelligence and Data Visualization with SharePoint and SQL Server

Branding, Design, and User Experience

SharePoint Social and Yammer

FOR YOUR ENTIRE TEAM: Unlike other events, SharePoint Intersection’s content chairs—SharePoint MVPs Andrew Connell and Dan Holme—have assembled an event that addresses the needs of everyone who is involved with, touched by, and impacted by SharePoint. You’ll find best-of-class content, whether you are a

Developer

IT Pro

Business manager or platform owner

Business user

Designer

SUCCEED TOGETHER: When it comes to maximizing the business value of SharePoint, and delivering real business needs, it takes the entire team. We must come together, as business, IT and developers, to solve our problems. At SharePoint Intersection, each scenario or workload features a unique Intersection Session, in we bring together IT, business, developers and our SharePoint Experts to answer questions, tackle the most pressing issues, get on the same page, and to build a path to success. We’re confident that the open forum Q&A style of these Intersection sessions will be among the most valuable experiences you take away from SharePoint Intersection.

BEYOND SHAREPOINT: SharePoint Intersection is just one of the events that is part of DEV INTERSECTION. And as a SharePoint Intersection attendee, you have full access to dozens of sessions across other Intersection events, covering SQL, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, Azure, and Open Source.

FREE SURFACE OR XBOX ONE*

*When you make the most of SharePoint Intersection by registering with a Show Package that includes one or more full-day workshops, you’ll receive your choice of an XBOX ONE or SURFACE RT! See the website for details.

I had a great time presenting at the SharePoint Saturday Redmond event today at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond.

My session was aimed at asking people to think about building and architecting solutions today while keeping the future in mind … even if you don’t have any plans to move to the cloud in the near future.

Even if you are not building cloud apps or solutions today this is still relevant. Get code out of your SharePoint processes and into a loosely coupled architecture. Your servers will be safer, faster and will remain up more often.

One of great joys of the SharePoint community is the momentum of the SharePoint Saturday community led events. These are run by the community for the community and are one day events … on a (you guessed it) Saturday. People take time our of their personal schedules to attend and hear from speakers on all sorts of topics.

SharePoint Saturday Redmond is coming up again this year on the 21st of September.

This year Provoke Solutions are proud to be a Gold sponsor of the event and will have a booth on site Come and talk with us about your SharePoint needs!

This year I have the pleasure of speaking at the event also:

Designing and Building solutions with the future in mindWant to know how to ensure you don’t develop your way into a dead end? The cat is out of the bag on the new Apps development model in SharePoint 2013. Come and learn about architecting and designing your SharePoint development projects today in order to be set up for taking advantage of this new model in the future. We will cover all the basics on the new model to bring you up to speed, plus how they translate to decisions you need to make today in your projects to ensure you don’t dig a hole that’s hard to get out of in the future.

SharePoint Intersections is a new conference happening at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, October 27 – 30. They have a great set of sessions planned and its definitely worth taking a look at it. ASP.Net, Visual Studio, Azure and SQL Intersections all happen at the same time in the same place … so its not just a bunch of SharePoint people to hang out with too 🙂

REGISTRATION DISCOUNT: Get a $50 discount! Use the discount code “JOHNSON” during registration!

Bonus: If you Register for the SHOW or COMPLETE package you get a Surface RT or XBOX or gift card!

I have the great privilege of running a one day pre-con workshop on SharePoint App development alongside Andrew Connell:

This morning at TechEd North America i did a session on Office and SharePoint 2013 App development. In a nut shell it was 75mins of demos (8 or so). It was a mix of things I have found handy developing Apps, things I think are going to play an important role in App development (SPA apps) and other things that I think are handy for those getting started with App development.

Here is a summary of the demos:

#1 SignalR: Using SignalR in your apps backends for watching trace and debug information from your application. Great for when your code is running in Azure and you want visibility into what is going on.

#2 Token Caching: When you first are starting out with app development its not entirely obvious what all the tokens and parameters are that are passed to your app code. OR how to work with them. This demo was all about showing a lightweight way to cache and store the tokens for use in subsequent pages.

#3 Use OAuth to access SharePoint from apps for Office: This showed how to do “on the fly” OAuth from a task pane App in Excel. This lets an application ask the user for permissions to SharePoint resources when needed. In the example i showed Excel, but you can do the same from a SharePoint app.

#4 / #5 The SharePoint cross-domain library: Two demos showing techniques for calling out to external services (in this case my blog) from JavaScript running in a SharePoint hosted app. Also how to set up the CSOM for calling into the Host Web SharePoint site where you app is installed. Both scenarios show cross domain techniques available.

#6 Bring Office documents into your SharePoint apps with the Office Web Applications: Most people have seen the document preview windows you get in SharePoint search and document libraries that use the Office Web Applications. But you can also use these in your own Apps too. Great way to show documents alongside your App content.

#7 SPA Apps: Single Page Applications. Very kindly Andrew Connell allowed me to show his recently built Learning Path Manager demo which showcases an App built using Durandal, Knockout, Bootstrap, FontAwesome, LinqJS and Toastr. Finally SharePoint development has been possible using frameworks, tools and techniques that are moderns and current. All the cool kids are doing this stuff and I think its going to be a very interesting option for SharePoint app development going forward.For source and more information please refer to AC’s blog post.

#8 App CSS makes your app look like part of the experience: A simple demo showing how to use the Chrome Control and SP CSS in your provider hosted apps. I skipped this in the session due to time.

#9 Elevate your SharePoint app’s permissions with app-only calls: No more running code in process as system! The App model provides a fairly elegant way to elevate permissions without losing control of an apps privileges! Apps can make “app only” calls to SharePoint to do things that the App has rights to do, but not necessarily the user using the App.

#10 Yammer Integration – Bring your app to where users are by posting to the feed: Yammer provides some nice APIs to work with. For example REST APIs for posting the feed & OpenGraph APIs for posting activities. I demoed an App called “ShareIt” that takes a document and posts it to Yammer. The app will hopefully be in the 365 marketplace shortly (free) and I hope to do a follow up “how it works” blog post on it + full source for the app.

TechEd likely needs no explaining to most folks who read my blog, but in short it’s Microsoft’s big technical conference that covers pretty much all MS technologies and products under one roof. It’s a great event for taking in a lot of different topics vs. a more product specific event like SPC.

This year it is in New Orleans from June 3rd – June 6th and I will be there doing a session on SharePoint and App development tips and tricks.

In this session, we cover some tools and techniques for building out apps for Microsoft Office and SharePoint, including architecting for cross-domain scenarios, types of apps and much, much more. This is a must attend session for all app for Office and SharePoint developers.

Thursday June 6th at 10:15 am – Room TBD

So if you are are a SharePoint person attending it would be great to have you come along … or just get in touch at the event to chat!

I am presenting two sessions next week on Monday and Tuesday on the process of building SharePoint and the other on building modern intranets using search, metadata and blending the old style of hierarchical sites with newer techniques of search based solutions.

P&M308 – Leverage the power of metadata and search driven Intranets

Learn how to take all that chaos and clutter in your organization and move it to an organized discoverable system that enables users to quickly navigate and find documents and information that is most relevant to them. This is a soup to nuts session on the design decisions, things you need to think about and how to build a purely metadata and search driven Intranet to unlock the full power of your content.

This session is going to be all about building Intranets using the same features and functionality everyone is talking about in 2013 for building public facing internet sites. aka Web Content Management (WCM). I’ll discuss traditionally structured intranets, hierarchy and storage systems in SharePoint, authoring considerations & a model for blending the old style hierarchical intranets with modern search driven techniques!

Come and hear how you can leverage some of these new techniques with the old to deliver a great experience for your users whether they like to browse, search or a mixture of both 🙂